‘Waiting for the Seventh Wave’

I remember distinctly the excitement I felt as I put the final touches to my degree show at Sheffield, June 1981. It was the culmination of three years intense personal and intellectual change. Each one of my sculptures, or so I thought, was a self-contained entity, fragments of experience externalised in three dimensions. In a sense, this was true. What I had. Not been prepared for was that the fragments when juxtaposed, formed a whole picture, like the pieces of a jigsaw. The satisfaction of ‘fitting in’ the last piece revealed an unforeseen vulnerability. This completed picture was a celebration of personal experiences in visual form, a three-dimensional journal which I suddenly hoped no-one would read too carefully. What I omitted to take into account, along with those feelings, was that the work had a ‘formal’ language sophisticated enough to transcend the purely personal and to communicate to those wishing to engage with the work, on many different levels. It is with similar feelings of anticipation and excitement that I. now prepared for my forthcoming show, ‘Waiting for the Seventh Wave’. However, as my ideas have grown, the personal fragments of experience within the work are now more concealed, for example, in the patchworks where pieces of material are juxtaposed to make a whole.

I was originally inspired by the minimalists but wanted to contextualise my work more specifically with a women’s tradition of making. (I called this fusion ‘feminalism’) The patchwork quilt became the vehicle to link these two seemingly disparate traditions together.